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Tipping Point as Cliché
by Frank J. Regan
In some minds Global Warming may augur a boon for real estate not
previously longed for: the tundra, for example, that may take on the
aspect of idyllic parcels with lawns for bold entrepreneurs. The
cold North according to this dream might become a new Mecca for
those who would come to love the new warmth of climate change.
However, it is more likely that areas once covered in snow and
ice and soon to be green are going to be more problematic. A slow
and gradual transformation from the un-saleable to the ripe for the
pickings is rather to be rife with change, quantum change. Tipping
point, a phrase stolen from science and now so overused in general
speak that it threatens to become cliché, is nevertheless the proper
and principle concern of Global Warming.
For, while there has always been climate change on this planet,
some of it occurring through the time of man, there has never been
the threat of dramatic, quick quantum change caused by a fast-moving
amalgamation of issues to a tipping point in a cascade of cause and
effect. (Whew! That was a mouthful and I won’t do it again.)
An example, or rather the archetypal model for this effect is the
warming of the polar caps, which increase the sun's warming power on
the water due to the lack of the snow to reflected sunlight, the
albedo effect, thus changing the salinity of the ocean and thus the
relationship to cold and warmer waters and eventually the direction
of oceans currents.
In language a word or phrase can become so overused that the
cliché numbs the mind and you don’t really hear it. That’s a problem
because in Nature some processes, like global warming, keep
repeating themselves so often that one becomes habituated to them,
until tiresome or not, a cool breeze that had always before wafting
off the ocean warming green fields suddenly delivers something quite
unexpected.
Check out this report: Living on Earth:
Melting Ice "A new study from the National Snow and Ice Data
Center in Boulder, Colorado shows that scientists grossly
underestimated the rate of ice loss due to warming from greenhouse
gas emissions. The study claims that if current trends continue, we
could be facing an ice-free Arctic summer within the next 50 years."
--from Living on Earth: Sound
Journalism for the Whole Planet
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